The Return of Meteor Boy? Read online

  “Thermo invited them to record his team in action.”

  “Where is my dad?” I asked for what felt like the dozenth time.

  “He’s under the cake,” Fluster responded. “So are the rest of the New New Crusaders. They had almost beaten those hippies, but then Cyclotron showed up and whipped up an enormous tornado around the cake and pushed it over on top of them. But don’t worry, they’re fine. Right now they’re eating their way out from the center. That’s what all the reporters are hanging around to photograph. They should be free in about fifteen minutes.”

  Clearly, he had no concept of how fast my dad could eat cake. Only seconds after Uncle Fluster said it, my dad suddenly erupted from beneath the house-sized heap of dessert. He looked a little dazed, as anyone would who had just eaten who knows how many pounds of cake. There were crumbs all over him ranging from speck sized to fist sized. His mouth was still stuffed and chewing, as well. But worst of all, the second his eyes began to focus, flashes started going off by the dozen. He had wanted publicity, and, much to my horror, publicity was what he was getting.

  He wasn’t upset, though. He clearly thought it was incredible. Brushing as many of the cake crumbs off himself as possible, he strode confidently forward to meet the press, followed closely by the rest of his team. Stench sighed with relief as his father appeared, blowing the crumbs off himself with one gust of his breath.

  The New New Crusaders talked it up with the reporters, clearly enjoying the exposure, regardless of the situation. Meanwhile, I turned to Uncle Fluster.

  “Did they get away with the cone?” I asked, already fearing the answer.

  “Yes.” He sighed. “And it was the last one. It’s such a shame, because they were great for advertising my business.”

  I didn’t bother pointing out to him that so far he had still sold only one ice cream cone. Instead, I turned to my teammates, who were focusing on the chunks of pastry littered all around us.

  “It’s nt bd,” Tadpole mumbled as he shoved a huge hunk into his mouth.

  “Maybe your dads should open a bakery,” Plasma Girl agreed as she sampled a daintier-sized piece.

  “How come there’s no frosting?” Halogen Boy asked in disappointment.

  “The frosting is going to be added tomorrow,” I heard my father say from behind me. “Although, we may have to put that off for a day while we rebuild.”

  “Rebuild?” Stench said in alarm. He’d noticed how close this cake had come to crushing his house.

  “Sure!” my dad replied. “Today we did seven layers. I think we can salvage a few of them, and tomorrow we should be able to bring the total to ten!”

  “Cool!” Tadpole, Hal, and Plasma Girl all responded. No one else seemed to share my concern that all three of the giant metal cones were now in the hands of villains, but of course, we still had no idea what they were or what use they were to anyone.

  “But I think that’s enough for today,” my father continued. “OB, let’s go get your mom and celebrate the NNC’s publicity coup.”

  I would hardly describe the past hour’s events that way, but I waved good-bye to my teammates and turned to head home with my father. He was in a great mood despite the fact that his team had gotten beaten and then buried under tons of pastry.

  “We’re going to be the hit of the bake sale,” he said confidently. “Everyone’s going to come see our giant cake. And I owe the whole idea to you.”

  This disaster had been my idea, I realized. And my Dad was thrilled about it. So who was I to complain? He was unhurt and that was all that really mattered. The truth was I had problems of my own that I should be focusing on instead.

  “I wish I could say the same about my science project.” I sighed.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” he said. “Tell me how it’s going.”

  “Well, it’s been hard making much progress with Melonhead,” I admitted. “But I think I have an idea for a model of a working time machine. If I can get a cylinder to rotate at near the speed of light, in theory it could redirect the flow of time in such a way that you could pass either into the future or into the past. To make it work, though, there are three problems I still need to solve.”

  “What would those be?” my father said.

  “First, I need a power source that could make the cylinder turn at nearly the speed of light.”

  “Is that difficult?” he asked.

  “Very,” I responded. “Second, I need a device to calibrate movement either into the past or into the future. There’s no point having a time machine if you can’t set it to travel to exactly the time you want.”

  “Of course,” he agreed, as we reached our front porch.

  “And finally, there’s the issue of the light cones—the cone-shaped paths of light which contain all past and future possibilities. When the cylinder rotates at near light speed, the gravitational distortion will cause a warpage of space-time . . . but of course the problem is that these light cones, which represent past and future pathways of time, are invisible. In order to show that the machine is working, it needs to come attached with— Oh, my gosh!”

  “What is it, OB?” my dad asked.

  All of a sudden, it struck me. The spinning water tower, the cones, and everything else I saw in MagnoBox’s replay finally all made sense.

  “It has to come attached with cones that will visibly show the warping of space-time. Don’t you see?! Professor Brain-Drain’s device was a time machine—a Time Tipler! The water tower in Telomere Park was the cylinder, the lever set the direction of time either forward or backward, and the metal cones were the visible indicators that the cylinder had achieved a warpage of space-time. When the cones tipped far enough, travel through time became possible.”

  “But what about that speed-of-light business?” he reminded me. “You said that would take an awful lot of energy.”

  “Nearly the speed of light,” I corrected as I pondered this mystery. And then I had it.

  “The meteorite!” I shouted. “The prodigium meteorite on top of the tower was Professor BrainDrain’s power source—the meteorite that Meteor Boy stole from him at the very last second!”

  And then I remembered the number I saw on the digital counter when MagnoBox showed me his rerun of the events of that day twenty-five years ago. The number was twenty-five. All of a sudden everything made sense, including the lever that had been switched to the forward position.

  “Meteor Boy wasn’t destroyed,” I said as calmly as I could. “He was propelled into the future—twenty-five years into the future. By my calculation, he’s due to arrive here in about seventy-two hours.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  When Melons Fly

  I put aside my shock that Professor Brain-Drain had apparently invented a time machine and that the device may have catapulted Meteor Boy into a future that was just three days away. I had a science experiment to work on, and the realization that I might be on the right track had me focused once again on the project.

  Digging an old battery-powered phonograph from the attic, I took the tall potato chip can from my book bag, punched a hole in the bottom of it, and then attached it to the turntable. Flipping the switch, I soon had a revolving cylinder just like Professor BrainDrain’s, only on a much smaller scale.

  For a moment I paused, pondering the incredible coincidence. Independently, I had devised a prototype for a time machine that was nearly identical to one invented twenty-five years earlier by Professor Brain Drain. A chill ran down my spine. Was it a good thing that I had been thinking along the same lines as the late, loathsome egghead of evil?

  By Tuesday morning, I had managed to put that disturbing thought behind me. I gathered up my time machine prototype, and then, as an afterthought, the chunk of prodigium and the Oomphlifier from my nightstand. I shoved both of them in my pockets thinking either might provide a source of power for the device.

  I met up with my friends at school and they immediately began asking about my spinning p
otato chip can. I had painted over it to save myself having to explain this strange product that AI was apparently going to be launching soon. I also refrained from mentioning my new theory on Meteor Boy’s upcoming reappearance. It just sounded too far-fetched to believe. I needed more proof.

  As the bell rang, Miss Marble dove right in.

  “All right,” she grumped. “You had all yesterday to work out what your projects are going to be. Now I want to hear about them. First I want an explanation of your subject and then a description of how you plan to demonstrate it. Let’s start with Tadpole and Stench.”

  My two buddies looked helplessly at each other, arguing with their eyes over who should do the talking. Stench finally realized that he couldn’t possibly do a worse job of describing their project than Tadpole, so he plunged ahead.

  “We’re studying the paths that objects take when they’re launched into the air, and how gravity makes them come back down in specific ways.”

  “For our experiment,” Tadpole interrupted, “we’re going to fire off water-pressure bottle rockets.”

  “Dream on, kid.” Miss Marble stopped him cold. “If you think I’m letting you launch weapons into the air, you’re nuts.”

  “We have some other ideas,” Stench added, elbowing Tadpole in the side.

  “You better,” concluded Miss Marble. “Okay, Cannonball, what have you and Halogen Boy come up with?”

  Hal just sat sheepishly next to Cannonball, letting him do all the talking.

  “Our project concerns static electricity and how it can be used to generate a magnetic field,” the jerk answered smugly.

  “And what kind of an experiment are you planning?” Miss Marble asked suspiciously, glancing over at Hal.

  “Halogen Boy’s power is going to represent an electric charge,” Cannonball responded matter-of-factly. “And then we’ll demonstrate the static electricity that occurs and its magnetic properties.”

  “So,” said Miss Marble, “you’ve turned your partner into the experiment.”

  “Exactly,” replied Cannonball, not the least bit ashamed of himself.

  “And how do you feel about this, Hal?” Miss Marble asked.

  With a brief, nervous glance at Cannonball, Hal answered as he’d been instructed.

  “Uh, it’s fine,” he said reluctantly.

  “Hmm, we’ll see,” Miss Marble said. “But for now let’s keep moving.”

  Team by team, Miss Marble continued to question us about our projects. Plasma Girl and Little Miss Bubbles were far along on their “tea party” experiment. Lobster Boy and Limber Lass were going to show how beakers of water could be used to make a xylophone. The Quake and Sparkplug, ever eager for destruction, were building a volcano. Meanwhile, Puddle Boy and the Spore had planted some peas in the hope of growing something by Thursday.

  It wasn’t until she called on me that I realized Melonhead wasn’t there. His unexplained absence left me with the job of making my spinning can and his potato clock sound interesting. That turned out to be a task beyond my abilities. By the time I finished, I think Miss Marble had resigned herself to the inevitability of a science fair disaster.

  “Well, I guess these projects are about as exciting as one can expect with only a few days to prepare,” she said with a shrug. “Now break up into your teams and let’s see what we can do to liven some of them up. I’ll come by and review them one at a time.”

  The day dragged on as Miss Marble spent almost a half hour with each pair of my classmates. While all this was happening, I sat by myself and pondered the mystery of Meteor Boy. Would he really return in two days time? Or had he vanished in a flash of light because he had been destroyed? I had already determined that time travel wasn’t necessarily impossible, just highly improbable. Perhaps the energy in a large chunk of prodigium could have provided all the power Professor Brain-Drain needed to operate his time machine.

  I pulled out my copy of the Li’l Hero’s Handbook to look it up.

  My theory that the prodigium was the Professor’s power source appeared to be accurate. I patted the chunk in my pocket, imagining what its value might be. (The book had said incalculable, but I can calculate pretty high!) As the afternoon flowed by, more pieces of the puzzle fell into place, and I felt like I was beginning to finally grasp the problems involved with developing a time machine. A little more time to myself was all I needed to . . .

  “Greetingth, fellow thkolarths!”

  I closed my eyes in frustration, reopening them to watch Melonhead make his triumphal entry as Meteor Boy.

  “What’s with the new costume?” Cannonball asked. “Are those melon seeds streaking across your chest?”

  “Don’t be thilly.” Melonhead chuckled patiently. “Thith ith my new uniform for fighting crime along-thide the Amathing Indethtructo himthelf. From thith moment on you can call me Meteor Boy!”

  And then, to the astonishment of all my classmates, Melonhead shot into the air. He hovered there for only a moment and then let himself settle back down to the ground.

  LI’L HERO’S HANDBOOK

  THINGS

  PRODIGIUM

  A substance so rare that it may not even exist. None has been seen in Superopolis since the only known sample of it was stolen from the Museum of Science. If any does exist, however, its value would quite likely be incalculable. It’s the amount of power compressed into the substance that makes the material so utterly unique.

  “Wow!” the rest of my classmates said in amazement. A huge grin burst across Melonhead’s face. With the exception of my teammates, the kids in my class mobbed Melonhead, each of them shouting “How did you do that?!”

  “Thorry, guyth,” he informed them in his most condescending manner, “I’m afraid that’th a thecret. I’m under contract to Indethtructo Induthtrieth, and I’m not allowed to thpeak about any company buthineth.”

  As the rest of my classmates protested and complained, Melonhead took his seat with a self-satisfied smile. As far as I could remember, this was the first time that he had ever been the center of attention—at least in a nonhumiliating sort of way.

  “It’s about time you showed up,” I griped as I slid my desk over toward his. “We’ve only got a couple more days to get this thing figured out. I’ve built us a rotating cylinder. Now we need to develop a gauge to measure the movement of time.”

  “I have the perfect tholuthion,” he said.

  Eagerly he bent down to fish something out of his book bag. It was no surprise when he stood back up revealing—his potato clock.

  “I’ve made improvmenth to it,” he insisted.

  “Can you control the tides with it now?” I asked sarcastically.

  He looked at me blankly, not sure if I was joking, and then decided to plunge ahead.

  “Thee? I’ve added another thet of handths to it.”

  “So?”

  “Tho now it can meathure time both backward and forward.”

  I closed my eyes in frustration and counted to ten in an effort to calm myself down. When I opened them back up, Principal Doppelganger was standing in the front of the room. Miss Marble had just noticed him as well, and took a break from working with the Spore and Puddle Boy on their experiment.

  “I’m here with exciting news, Miss Marble,” he informed her.

  “Exciting for you maybe,” she huffed. “You’re not the one who has to get nearly a dozen projects into some sort of a semicompetent state by Thursday.”

  “You’ll do just fine,” Principal Doppelganger said soothingly, apparently as intimidated by our teacher as we were. “I have some more news about the fair.”

  “And what would that be?” she asked.

  “Oh, nothing to be worried about,” he said. “Just the location of the fair. It will be taking place right in the center of Telomere Park—near the giant water tower, which also just happens to be the subject of Crispo’s latest sculpture. Isn’t that exciting?”

  I would hardly have described the look on Miss Marble
’s face as excited, but my mouth dropped open in shock. Our science fair occurring twenty-five years to the day after Meteor Boy’s disappearance, and at the exact location, could not be a coincidence. Could it?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The Thubthtitute’th Thubthtitute

  “I can’t explain why,” I told my teammates as we left school, “but something suspicious is going on at Telomere Park.”

  “You don’t have to explain,” Stench insisted. “We saw MagnoBox’s broadcast. We know that was the site where Meteor Boy vanished.”

  “And we can tell that Cyclotron and those hippies are trying to reassemble Professor Brain-Drain’s device,” Plasma Girl added.

  My teammates just didn’t know what that device was, I reminded myself. But I would tell them—as soon as I was sure that I wasn’t crazy for believing it.

  We reached Telomere Park in about fifteen minutes and then made our way toward Crater Hill in the park’s center. We arrived to find the water tower hidden beneath a shroud with a large platform built around it. A reviewing stand had been set up alongside it, and a large crowd was gathered in front of the platform. At first we couldn’t see what was going on, but then the crowd parted enough to reveal . . .

  “The Amazing Indestructo,” we all groaned in unison. Sure enough, AI was standing on the platform that surrounded the tower.

  “What’s he doing here?” Plasma Girl said in disgust.

  “And look who’s with him,” added Stench. “It’s Mayor Whitewash!”

  “That’s not all. Melonhead is here, too!” I rolled my eyes in exasperation. “No wonder he left school so fast.”

  The annoying little creep was flying around above the crowd as if he were Meteor Boy himself. And then I saw the enormous banner hanging from the tower platform. It proclaimed: THE RETURN OF METEOR BOY! This was nothing more than a huge publicity gimmick to help build interest for AI’s big launch of Meteor Boy products on Thursday. Once again, and certainly not for the last time, his lack of decency astounded me. I could barely concentrate as the mayor began to speak.